Postcolonial Quotes

“Prospero, you are the master of illusion.
Lying is your trademark.
And you have lied so much to me
(Lied about the world, lied about me)
That you have ended by imposing on me
An image of myself.
Underdeveloped, you brand me, inferior,
That s the way you have forced me to see myself
I detest that image! What’s more, it’s a lie!
But now I know you, you old cancer,
And I know myself as well.”
― Aimé Césaire, A Tempest: Based on Shakespeare's 'The Tempest;' Adaptation for a Black Theatre

“We were strolling along the waterfront, his favourite walk, going nowhere in particular, the postcolonial condition.”
― Abdulrazak Gurnah, Admiring Silence

“Although I believe identity politics '"produces limited but real empowerment for its participants," it is important to note that it contains significant problems: first, its essentialist tendency; second, its fixed _we-they_ binary position; third, its homogenization of diverse social oppression; fourth, its simplification of the complexity and paradox of being privileged and unprivileged; and fifth its ruling out of intersectional space of diverse forms of oppression in reality.”
― Namsoon Kang, Cosmopolitan Theology: Reconstituting Planetary Hospitality, Neighbor-Love, and Solidarity in an Uneven World

“Walter Mignolo terms and articulates _critical cosmopolitanism, juxtaposing it with globalization, which is a process of "the homogeneity of the planet from above––economically, politically and culturally." Although _globalization from below_ is to counter _globalization from above_ from the experience and perspective of those who suffer from the consequences of _globalization from above_, cosmopolitanism differs, according to Mignolo, form these two types of globalization. Mignolo defines globalization as 'a set of designs to manage the world,' and cosmopolitanism as 'a set of projects toward planetary conviviality”
― Namsoon Kang, Cosmopolitan Theology: Reconstituting Planetary Hospitality, Neighbor-Love, and Solidarity in an Uneven World

“far noh mattah wat dey say,
come wat may,
we are here to stay
inna Inglan,
inna disya time yah...”
― Linton Kwesi Johnson, Inglan is a Bitch

“Economic development has been central to the ideologies of post-colonial African states.”
― Sam Mbah, African Anarchism: The History of a Movement

“Philosophy of Bread

To Lenin and Iqbal:

The East treats me as a second class citizen, the West as a third class citizen still,

life is mired in fees, rents and unending bills.

New century’s children keep on breeding, farms get smaller and farmers poorer, it’s the bankruptcy mills,

bread lines get longer, the pestilence kills

whilst the few eat money and honey,


And God laughs at the future.”
― Asad Bilal Rizvi, Postcolonial Freedom:

“At the National Museum of the American Indian,

68 percent of the collection is from the United States.

I am doing my best to not become a museum

of myself. I am doing my best to breathe in and out.”
― Natalie Díaz, Postcolonial Love Poem

“Greening in the epoch of biodiversity dwindle is a vestigial ritual.”
― Sneha Subramanian Kanta

“In our resistance to the business mentality, we are still Spanish, stubbornly Spanish. Also, we have not stopped being Catholic, nor have we stopped being romantic, and we cannot conceive of private life without love, nor of public life without chivalry, or of our children’s education without ideals.

If you want to be our friends, you will have to accept us as we are. Do not attempt to remodel us after your image. Mechanical civilization, material progress, industrial techniques, wealth, comfort, hobbies—all these figure in our programs of work and enjoyment of life. But, for us, the essence of human life does not lie in such things.”
― Juan José Arévalo, The Shark and the Sardines